World Wide Words - 28 Aug 10

Fri Aug 27 17:05:08 UTC 2010

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 701          Saturday 28 August 2010
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Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
Editor: Michael Quinion             US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org               ISSN 1470-1448     
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Jumentous.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: In a trice.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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CUCUMBER TIME  Peter Scoging read this piece online and commented 
on my reference to "cabbage", the term for the tailor's perk of the 
offcuts of cloth: "Amongst machinists in the UK, 'cabbage' is very 
much a living idiom - and I believe this is the case everywhere in 
what I suppose one would call collectively the garment trades. My 
sister was involved in the trade from the early 1970s through to 
1999, and confirms that 'cabbage' in this sense was a regular part 
of the language for as long as she was involved." 

Mordechai Ben-Menachem and No'am Newman say a Hebrew translation of 
"cucumber time" is the usual term in Israel for the summer silly 
season. I have since discovered that similar terms, either 
featuring cucumbers or gherkins, exist in Estonian, Czech, Polish 
and Hungarian. Any more?

REVIEW ONLINE  As forewarned last week, I've written a full review 
of the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, mentioning 
that its US stablemate, the New Oxford American Dictionary, has a 
new edition out soon, too. It is online: http://wwwords.org?ODE3.

2. Weird Words: Jumentous  /dZu:'ment at s/
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On recently buying some well-rotted stable manure for my garden, I 
was naturally apprehensive lest it be too obviously jumentous. I'm 
glad to be able to report that my worries were unfounded.

The word is usually explained as meaning a smell like that of the 
urine of a horse. It comes from Latin "jumentum", which the Oxford 
English Dictionary explains means a yoke-beast, from "jugum", a 
yoke. Though this might reasonably include oxen, the Oxford Latin 
Dictionary helpfully notes - somewhat surprisingly in view of its 
origin - that in Roman times it usually meant horses or mules, not 
cattle. Similarly, the obsolete English word "jument", from the 
same source, could mean any beast of burden, but was most often 
applied to a horse or donkey.

The first appearance of "jumentous" that I can trace is in this 
report of the symptoms of a sick person:

    No motion of the bowels; urine very scanty, red with a 
    jumentous and lateritious sediment, also great thirst, 
    great dryness of mouth and tongue, which were covered 
    with a dirty white covering.
    [The British Journal of Homoeopathy, 1801. The word 
    was deemed to be unfamiliar enough that it was defined in 
    a footnote as relating to a working horse. "Lateritious", 
    from Latin "later", a brick, means resembling brick, or 
    coloured brick-red, a word that has usually been applied 
    only to urine.]

Other nineteenth-century works used "jumentous" in the same way, 
but by the end of the century it had become extremely rare, and 
remains so. Peter Bowler asked of it in The Superior Person's 
Second Book of Weird and Wondrous Words of 1992, "Is this word 
really necessary?" You may concur; I couldn't possibly comment.

3. Wordface
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EXTREME SPORT?  Recently, the press widely reported a warning from 
the Spanish authorities against a dangerous game played by young 
holidaymakers on the Balearic islands. They return to their hotels 
from a night out, drunk or on drugs, and attempt to swing from one 
balcony to another or jump off balconies into swimming pools below. 
Videos have appeared on Internet sites and the activity has become 
known as BALCONING. Four deaths have been reported this summer.

ON THE WAY OUT  Paul Hensby, founder of the website My Last Song, 
describes an intriguing funerary rite called BEACHING. The deceased 
person's family and friends find a suitable beach, mark out his or 
her name or some suitable message in the sand, fill the furrows 
with the cremains (cremated remains) and wait for the tide to come 
in and wash them out to sea. A close study of tide tables and the 
current phase of the moon is essential. He comments that careful 
timing of the ceremony is also needed to avoid clashes with people 
intent on going swimming or building sand castles.

SODCASTING  This is the broadcasting of music in public through the 
loudspeaker on one's mobile phone. The result is not only often 
intensely annoying to bystanders but is also tinny, lacking in bass 
because of the small loudspeaker size. (Some music tracks are being 
rerecorded to transpose bass parts into a higher register so that 
they can be heard in such circumstances.) The term is a play on 
others ending in "-casting", particularly "podcasting" (downloading 
recordings from the net to a personal audio player). One wag said 
that SODCASTING is "podcasting for the grass roots" or, in British 
slang, for the sods, unpleasant or obnoxious people. 

5. Q and A: In a trice
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Q. In the expression "in a trice", where does "trice" come from? 
[Robert Kaplan]

A. Before Britannia ruled the waves, the Dutch were the dominant 
maritime nation of Europe and much of our seafaring vocabulary can 
be traced back to Dutch words, "trice" included.

It's from the Middle Dutch word "trîsen", to hoist, which is an 
older form of the modern Dutch "trijsen". It came into English in 
the late fourteenth century. In maritime usage, it meant to lift 
something using a rope and was usually coupled with "up". In that 
form, it has been part of naval terminology pretty much ever since:

    On the boatswain blowing his whistle the men mustered 
    upon deck and formed line, whilst the captain, standing 
    well in front of them, delivered a few words to them. 
    "When I give the word," he concluded, "you shall 
    discharge your pieces, and by thunder, if any man is a 
    second before or a second after his fellows I shall trice 
    him up to the weather rigging!"
    [Cyprian Overbeck Wells, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 
    first published in the Boy's Own Paper, Christmas 
    1886.]

However, the more usual implication of "trice up" is not only to 
hoist something but also to secure it. Perhaps the best-known case 
is in the reveille call, "All hands heave out and trice up", which 
originally told sailors to get out of their hammocks and lash them 
up out of the way. Here's another common instruction from sailing-
ship days:

    He therefore turned the hands up, "mend sails," and 
    took his station amidship on the booms, to see that this, 
    the most delinquent sail, was properly furled. "Trice up 
    - lay out - All ready forward?"
    [Newton Forster, by Captain Marryat, 1832.]

Landlubbers - from the first known user, Geoffrey Chaucer, in the 
Canterbury Tales - had a slightly different meaning, to pull 
quickly or suddenly at something, to snatch at it. If you did 
something "at a trice", you did it in one pull, so immediately or 
without delay. In time "trice" changed from meaning a hoist or a 
heave to "instant" or "moment".

5. Sic!
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The long arm of the law? Leo Boivin tells us about a story from the 
Washington Post last Saturday: "A Montgomery County police officer 
has been charged with assault for hitting a suspect on the head 
with a baton after the suspect had fled, officials said Friday." 

A caption to a photograph in the Boston Globe last Thursday was 
submitted by Walter Sheppard: "A cyclist rode past the historic 
Chatham house repainted fluorescent lime green and yellow, and has 
the town talking." For the avoidance of doubt, it is the colour 
scheme of the repainted house that has the town talking, not the 
cyclist.

Maureen Whitaker mentioned a report from BBC News for Hampshire and 
the Isle of Wight on 25 August: "Police are trying to reunite 
precious World War I documents and jewellery found in a bin with 
their owner."

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